I PS 3513 
.R454 
S4 
1907 
Copy 1 



UBBIN' DID IT 



Scrubbin' Did It 



BY 
REV. THOMAS E. GREEN, D. D. 






AUTHOt 



1 9 O 7 




b 


m 



T MAY sound a bit plati- 
tudinous to say that one 
never knows what is 
going to happen. It is a 
bit more thoughtful to 
say that one never 
knows where or when an ideal is going 
to materialize. I mean something from 
which one may gain, by dint of the least 
bit of reflection, an inspiration. 

It goes without sajong that the most 
of us rush along the strenuous ways of 
our profession, more concerned for the 
sordid mechanism by which railroad 
schedules co-ordinate with the current 



calendar, than for much idealizing of 
passing things. We are much like him 
of whom it was said that 

"The yellow primrose by the brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And nothing more." 

It is the mark of real genius — the 
hall stamp on him on whom the gods 
have smiled, that he 

«* * * Finds tongues in trees, 
Books in the running brooks. 
Sermons in stones, and 
Good in everything." 

But you do occasionally catch a 
vision, you do once in a while find an 
inspiration in the most imexpected of 
places. 

I think I am not entirely indifferent 
to the voices that call jfrom the heart 
of beauty, or sound from the soul of 
grandeur, as we hear them now and 
then in the pilgrimage of this world. I 
am quite sure that I can thrill as many 



thrills as any one when I stand amid 
the Gothic arches of the pines, uplifting 
their long flung naves beneath an 
amethystene dome besprent with fres- 
coed stars — over a pavement tiled in 
emerald mosaiced with a tangled ara- 
besque of flowers. I know that I can 
feel the puniness of man's pretense, 
when on some beetling crag, mid earth 
ribs upward thrust, I gaze upon the 
eternal innocence of snows like vestal 
virgins, that never sin because they 
never feel the kiss of hot temptation. 

Yes, I have gained inspiration from 
all of these; but I foimd a lasting lesson 
today — where do you imagine? At 
Wahoo, Nebraska! 

W^ahoo! They tell me it means 
"bad Indian," tho' you could fancy 
nothing bad, not to say savage, in the 
little town Ijdng so quietly in the peace- 
ful environs of its com fields, and, as if 



to make the contrast greater between 
name and fact, the large proportion of 
the people here and hereabouts are 
German and Bohemian — the most 
quiet, home-making and home-loving 
of all the alien lines that blend into the 
complex resultant of our American life. 
Wahoo! I opened the course there, 
giving my lecture to as attentive and 
thoughtful an audience as one might 
hope to meet; rested, unvexed, in com- 
fort at a well-kept inn, where every 
kindness was shown me, and in the 
early morning said good-bye and 
started on my way. My bags had 
gone on the wagon — I chose to walk 
the half-mile through the snappy, fros- 
ty October morning. 

I turned onto the platform and ap- 
proached the depot. Just a plain, or- 
dinary Chicago CSi, Northwestern depot 
— one sees them every day. I opened 



the door of the waiting room to buy 
my ticket — and — what! Where was I? 

Before me was a floor that actually 
shown in snowy whiteness; a stove pol- 
ished to the last degree of brilliancy, 
with straight, bright stovepipe reach- 
ing to the flue; the windows fleckless, 
and each with a neat, cheap, but tidy, 
Holland shade — all drawn to the same 
exact level; on the walls a medley of 
railway scenes and advertising pictures, 
but all neatly framed and hung, not 
without artistic consistency; a water 
cooler, with a clean granite cup; in one 
window a tank of goldfish, in another 
some neatly potted plants; along one 
wall a convenient rack filled with time 
tables of various roads and magazines 
for tedious waits. Where was I? 

"Ah!" I said, "this is the ladies' wait- 
ing room. Some tidy woman is think- 
ing of her traveling sisterhood. I be- 



long at the other end. There I'll find 
the familiar, oft-repeated, muddy 
floor, the stinking spit-boxes, the 
grimy windows, the rusty stove, the 
scattered ashes—all the nasty squalor 
and the disease -breeding filth of the 
usual country depot. 

Reluctantly I crossed to the other side. 
Could it be so? A clean, wholesome 
room, with well swept floor, polished 
stove, pictured walls, shaded windows; 
on one side a home-made desk, with 
ink well, pens, some company paper 
and envelopes. Visions of Utopia be- 
gan to shape themselves. 

But I had little time to dream— I had 
to have a ticket. I went to the window. 
A big man with a strong clean face 
made out my ticket. 

"How do you do it?" I said won- 
deringly. 



"Scrubbin*," said he briefly, "there's 
a heap of virtue in soap and water 
when they're properly laid on." 

"Can you keep it so?" I said doubt- 
fully. 

"Sure!" said he. "Things ought to 
be always clean, and I notice that even 
when dirty folks come in where it's 
clean, it makes them more careful." 

And just then I had a visible proof, 
for a big man who was "eatin' tobacco," 
suddenly turned to the right, then to 
the left, then got up and went out on 
the platform, and shut the door behind 
him before he spat! 

"Company do anything to help 
you?" I said, as the train whistled. 

"Oh, bless you, no!" said the man 
of Spotless Town, "I don't do it for 
that. I just like things clean and or- 
derly, and it's just as easy as not to 
keep them so." 



I looked back at Wahoo— before 
we turned the curve. There was the 
depot— just a common Northwestern 
depot — but as I said, one never knows 
what one is going to find. I had found 
a lesson. 

Station agent at Wahoo is not a 
remarkably exalted position, and yet 
my unknown, unnamed friend had 
made it blossom. Everything ought 
to blossom, and he had taken the most 
habitually ugly and untidy thing on 
earth — a country depot — and made 
you remember it for its cleanliness and 
order. 

Cui bono? Well, why does the 
poet sing, the artist paint, the preacher 
exhort, the reformer labor, if not to rid 
this world of ugliness, of discord, of un- 
cleanliness — to preach God's evangel 
of beauty? 

Ask a more practical, characteris- 



tically twentieth century question: 
what does he get for it all? 

Nothing! save as you count his own 
satisfaction. That's generally the way 
in this world. 

You remember Browning's "Herve 
Riel" who "saved the King his ships," 
and then was told to "name his own 
reward." 

He laughed — did Herve Riel — he 
had not done it for reward. But when 
they pressed him he said : 

"Since it's ask, and have I may, 
Come a whole half-holiday — 
Leave to go and see my wife, 
Whom I call *La Belle Aurore.' 
This he asked and this he got — 
Nothing more." 

But some day, maybe, a stray Chi- 
cago CEi Northwestern official, with 
"power to act," may blunder into the 
depot at Wahoo, and when he sees 
what that depot is, and remembers 



what most depots are, he may take 
my nameless friend and send him out 
to start a depot crusade, and the first 
thing you know all depots will be clean 
and decent, and all this will be the re- 
sult of the inspiration that started at 
\A^ahoo. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
015 905 5^^ 




